Keep the Snowshoes in the Closet and Learn How to Fish For Worms

Rain Total Forecast Friday Night

NAM 00Z Sun Precip

Really, nothing has changed much from the previous post. I’m using the 00Z Friday NAM

NAM 6Z Sun Precip

to illustrate. If you look at the 00Z Sunday run time frame, you see the bullet point for precip but when you look at the surface temperature, its above freezing. The extrapolated data indicates 37.1 degrees and also shows the bottom 50 mb or so to be above freezing. That’s a problem. 6 hours later, we’re a shade above freezing at the surface and below freezing from 50 mb down. But, the precip is largely gone. The air aloft will be getting colder so it will squeeze out whatever moisture there is. The ground will probably be too warm as well. In short, look for a lousy weekend. Rain and a few t’storms Friday night (maybe that will help the cards) with temperatures falling into the low to mid 40’s on

NAM 00Z Sun SFC Temps

Saturday afternoon. Showers moving back in Saturday night turning to perhaps some

NAM 6Z Sun SFC Temps

flurries. No accumulations. Then Sunday the clouds decrease late on Sunday but highs only make it to the low 40’s. A tad warmer on Monday in advance of another cold front with decidedly colder air behind it. 40 may be a struggle on Tuesday. In other words, nothing has really changed. Any snow on Saturday night will be insignificant except as a conversation piece and as we’ve been advertising for 3 days now, even colder air for Tuesday.

Fishing For Worms

A Nutty and somewhat disgusting This Date in History:

I guess in the 19th Century the tapeworm was a problem in the United States. The tapeworm is relatively

Figure 1

common in the 21st century in Latin America, the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa. It comes about because of poor hygiene or undercooked meat. It’s really pretty nasty as it lives in one’s intestine and the only real clue that one has it is when it appears…use your imagination of how that happens. From what I have read, there really isn’t a symptom of weight loss. Anyway…so there may have been a problem of tapeworms in 19th Century America. Along comes American ingenuity, which isn’t always so great.

Dr. Alpheus Myers was a doctor in Logansport, Indiana and he came up with a “cure.” He called it a “tapeworm trap” and he received a patent(read details here) for it on this date in 1854. His invention was one that involved no surgical procedure or medicines. All a patient had to do was swallow a capsule

figure 2

of sorts that had bait inside it. Not sure what he used for “bait.” The patent said, “any nutritious substance.” Wonder if a Twinke would work? The capsule was attached to a string and the patient swallowed it “for a suitable duration to make the worm hungry.” What does that mean? An hour? A week? Someone was expected to walk around with a string hanging from his mouth waiting for the worm to get hungry. The worm was then expected to “seize the bait” at which time the trap catches its head in the trap. The string is then pulled out of the patients mouth and the head and entire length of the worm soon follows. I have no idea when one knows he’s caught a worm…does it tug on the line? Can you use a bobber?

If you try this at home, make sure that “in constructing the trap, care should be taken that the spring is only strong enough to hold the worm, and not strong enough to cause his head to be cut off.”